The reality of falsehood: Leo Tolstoy’s The Cossacks and the Romantic fashion of the Caucasus in Russian literature

Abstract

Leo Tolstoy set some of his first short stories in the Caucasus, a major object of Romantic exoticism in Russian literature. His distanced, calm sketches of the front—he served as a solider there—matched the trend of the time toward realism. The Cossacks (1863), on which Tolstoy spent ten years, disappointed the realist critics, however, with its Romantic love story and naive admiration of nature. In later years, Boris Eikhenbaum altered this prevailing view of Tolstoy’s novel, arguing that it was essentially a parody of Romanticism. Exploring ground between these two poles of interpretation of The Cossacks, this paper attempts to clarify how Tolstoy rejected the clear demarcation between Romanticism and realism, falsehood and reality. His novel demonstrates that “realism” need not be reduced to mimetic relationship between representation and object; false fancy also has its own reality, which influences and manipulates the protagonist.